WARNING: This post contains spoilers from the Sunday, April 28, episode of Game of Thrones.
It was a big night for Drake, his fans and Game of Thrones devotees. While the Degrassi alum accepted his award for the Top Billboard 200 Album at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards on Wednesday, May 1, he didn’t hold back from giving a shoutout to GoT character Arya Stark.
Drake, 32, thanked his fans, friends and all those involved with his album, Scorpion, before joking that he needed a “glass of champagne” and giving a nod to Maisie Williams’ Stark. “And, oh, shout-out to Arya Stark for putting in that work last weekend,” he quipped while he jokingly used his award as a weapon. (When he took the stage for the second time, he brought a bottle of Mod Sélection Réserve Champagne with him!)
The “In My Feelings” singer’s tribute comes less than a week after Stark’s character had a major surprise kill on the “Battle of Winterfell” episode of the HBO drama — a moment that Williams, 22, could barely believe she would be a part of.
“It was so unbelievably exciting,” Williams told Entertainment Weekly post-episode of defeating the Night King. “But I immediately thought that everybody would hate it; that Arya doesn’t deserve it. The hardest thing is in any series is when you build up a villain that’s so impossible to defeat and then you defeat them. It has to be intelligently done because otherwise people are like, ‘Well, [the villain] couldn’t have been that bad when some 100-pound girl comes in and stabs him.’ You gotta make it cool. And then I told my boyfriend and he was like, ‘Mmm, should be Jon [Snow] though really, shouldn’t it?’”
Though she was initially hesitant, Williams shared the moment she realized her character deserved the kill.
“When we did the whole bit with Melisandre, I realized the whole scene with [the Red Woman] brings it back to everything I’ve been working for over these past 6 seasons — 4 if you think about it since [Arya] got to the House of Black and White,” she explained. “It all comes down to this one very moment. It’s also unexpected and that’s what this show does. So then I was like, ‘F—k you Jon, I get it.’”
